Use of non-volatile based storage devices has been rapidly increasing over the years because they are portable and they have small physical size and large storage capacity. Storage devices come in a variety of designs.
Some storage devices, USB flash drives for example, are regarded as removable, which means that they are intended for removal from one host device to another, or for replacement with another storage device. Such removable devices are provided with a Universal Serial Bus (“USB”) interface in order to allow them to be connected to a computer system, for example.
USB flash drives as such may employ a variety of possible features, some of which a user may want to set before connecting his/her to a host.
U3 based applications is an example for such a feature. For example, a USB flash drive that is configured to comply with the U3 technology may be set by a user as a U3 device/regular mass storage device before mounting the USB flash drive to a host.
U3 form factor devices (also called U3 smart drives) are flash drive based USB devices containing U3 based applications. One such type of device is created for Microsoft™ Windows™ OS (Operating System), for example. A U3 application is a software application that is tuned to run directly from a U3 device. While the U3 application is running, the U3 application has access to most of the host's computer resources, such as but not limited to the volume of the device, the system's registry, the network adapters, etc. The U3 platform provides application mobility that can be used by a user to take his/her favorite programs and files and use them on any computer. With such technology, software applications are not tied to a single machine. Rather, the software can run off any appropriately equipped and configured device without installation on the host computer.
However, the auto-install process that is required during setup for enabling the U3 functionality is time-consuming and sometimes not desired by users at all. Furthermore, this process can be disturbing when mounting the device to a host PC (Personal Computer) that is not the main computer and/or when using the device with a non-computing device, such as a DVD player.
Removing and uninstalling the U3 feature that comes preinstalled and embedded in the USB flash drive is one way to overcome this. However, once the U3 feature is uninstalled and removed from the device, it's impossible to use this feature with the device again.
According to another approach, users may disable the U3 feature “on-line”, i.e., when the device is already mounted to a computer. In such case, users can prevent the U3 functionality from running automatically on their U3 smart drives by disabling this feature once the device is mounted to a host.